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Secrecy Cloaks Hanoi Reds Abuse of Navy Hero's Remains

June 1994 Issue
U.S. Veteran Dispatch


To his family and the Navy pilots who flew with him, Lt. Cmdr. Edwin Tucker of Balwinville, Mass., was nothing less than a hero, a man who sacrificed himself on their behalf.

To the Vietnamese who shot his F-8C Crusader jet out of the skies of North Vietnam on April 24, 1967, Lt. Cmdr. Tucker became little more than a scientific specimen to be poked and probed for whatever secrets it held.

Lt. Cmdr. Tucker died shortly after he parachuted from his crippled plane and landed near Hon Gay City northeast of Hanoi.

He was buried March 4, 1988, with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. What happened in the nearly 21 years between Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's downing and his burial has been an embarrassment to the U.S. government, a source of frustration and anguish to his family and an outrage to critics of U.S. government policy on the prisoners of war (POWs) and missing in action (MIAs) from the Vietnam War.

Intelligence reports and sources familiar with the case say Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's remains were used for medical research at a teaching hospital. A congressional source said that Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's skeletal remains, which were wired together at the joints, along with his flight helmet bearing his name, had been on public display in Vietnam for 15 years.

The remains were withheld from his family, despite repeated requests for their return, long after the Vietnamese agreed to cooperate with U.S. officials to determine the fate of more than 1,700 U.S. servicemen missing in that country.

Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's remains were repatriated Nov. 25, 1987, after family members and U.S. officials agreed not to disclose details about the case that might embarrass Vietnam.
A spokesman for the government of Vietnam said he had no specific information about the Tucker case or any of four other sets of remains that were returned at the same time.

"I don't know of any research (on Tucker) or anything like that," said Ha Huy Thong, press officer at the Vietnamese Mission in New York. He said the terms of the understanding Vietnam has with the United States require the remains of missing Americans to be repatriated as soon as they are found and are determined to be American.

Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's family has refused to discuss details of the case. After the funeral March 4, 1988, a brief summary of Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's downing was distributed by the Navy, but it made no mention of use of Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's remains for medical purposes.

The question of research on Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's remains is prominent, however, in a narrative of the case written by the Army's Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Hawaii. The narrative was presented several times to the Vietnamese during meetings on the POW/MIA issue.

"We have received numerous accounts which state that an American pilot was captured near Hon Gay City and taken to the city hospital where he subsequently died of his wounds," the narrative reads. "The accounts further state that after his death, his skeleton was prepared and used as a teaching aid in the medical school of Quang Ninh province in Hon Gay City," the narrative continues. "These reports were provided by persons formerly associated with either the medical school or the hospital and were received over a period of several years."

The reports were provided by Vietnamese who said they had seen Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's remains at the hospital and who fled the country after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. Among them was believed to be a nurse who participated in surgery performed on Lt. Cmdr. Tucker in a futile attempt to save his life shortly after his capture.

Before Tucker was captured, Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Scott Wilson said, he was assigned to a fighter squadron based aboard the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard.
On April 24, 1967, Tucker was flying ahead of eight bombers that had targeted rail lines in Hon Gay City. Tucker's mission was to go in ahead of the bombers and draw anti-aircraft fire away from them long enough to allow them to complete their bomb runs.

"As Lt. Cmdr. Tucker passed through 5,000 feet his plane took a direct hit," Wilson said. Lt. Cmdr. Tucker bailed out before the plane crashed, and the pilots in the bombers "observed a fully opened parachute," Wilson said.

Lt. Cmdr. Tucker was listed as a POW until 1974, when his status was changed to "killed in action, body not recovered."

When asked about the government narrative concerning use of Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's remains for research, Wilson replied, "I can't comment on that." Lt. Col. Keith Schneider, a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which analyzes reports on American servicemen still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia, also declined comment on the Tucker case.

However, three days earlier, March 17, 1988, a Pentagon official, demanding anonymity and contrary to Pentagon intelligence reports, denied that Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's remains had been on public display, stating "we simply don't know if it's true. Rarely do the Vietnamese give us extra information. Very seldom do they give us anything but remains.

"He landed literally in the middle of a village...and all the reports we have been able to collect say he was alive. We believe he was not in good health. He was either injured or shot on the way down. He was surrounded by villagers and put into a captured status immediately.

"This is a person I consider to be a hero and to have his name and the family name almost dragged through the mud...I just don't see any useful purpose to it," the officer said.

The Pow activists, however, say that it is not a case of dragging Lt. Cmdr. Tucker's or his family's name through the mud, but a case of the Pentagon again juggling the truth in an effort to conceal the lack of honesty of the Vietnamese communists and the atrocities they committed against our servicemen during and after the war.

The information for this story was taken from U.S. government documents and published news reports.





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